


Grand Ideas

by elegantanagram (Lir)



Series: HSWC 2013 Bonus Round Fills [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bar/Pub, Alternate Universe - Historical, Ambition, Bootlegging AU, Entrepreneur Dirk, F/M, Lack of Communication, Lounge Singer Roxy, POV Third Person, Rags to Riches, Unhappy marriage, Wordcount: 100-2.000, social climbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 15:08:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/914689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lir/pseuds/elegantanagram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She was a singer in a bar, when they met. Hardly a penny to her name, possessed of little more than her one nice dress with the fancy fringe that swayed when she walked and the sorrowful smile on her lips whenever she raised her voice to the meager crowd. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>He was a young man in a cheap suit, with grand ideas that outnumbered his riches in similar excess.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>It was fate, she supposed, that they would gravitate to each other.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grand Ideas

**Author's Note:**

> Almost forgot about this one, which was written for the [Homestuck Shipping World Cup](http://hs-worldcup.dreamwidth.org/) way back in Bonus Round One over a month ago. The quote prompting it was:
> 
> _"I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability. But, upon my lost soul, I won't be bad towards you again." -Thomas Hardy Tess of the D'urbervilles_

-

She was a singer in a bar, when they met. Hardly a penny to her name, possessed of little more than her one nice dress with the fancy fringe that swayed when she walked and the sorrowful smile on her lips whenever she raised her voice to the meager crowd. 

He was a young man in a cheap suit, with grand ideas that outnumbered his riches in similar excess.

It was fate, she supposed, that they would gravitate to each other.

-

She was poor still, when he asked her hand in marriage. 

It was in that same smoky bar where she still sang, behind the stage where nobody liked to go – nobody besides the girls and the musicians, anyway. Down on one knee he went, all subtle dramatism, and more than the cut of the stone he offered to her finger, what she noticed was that the cut of his suit was not so poor. She placed her hand on his shoulder, trembling for balance and fingering the fine weave of quality wool, and breathed her “Yes” into his waiting ears. 

Her luck was changing, she imagined, a little bit at a time. Yes, he was at the bar more nights than he was absent, talking to the girls, drinking the liquor, talking to _her._ But she never would have hoped for this.

He never seemed the type for settling down. 

-

He didn't settle down, whirling dervish of a man that he became. He was a restless creature whose movements never ceased, perpetually in motion because he feared stagnation more than death. His empire rose an inch at a time, carved out of their poverty with his bones for scythes, with his naked hands building them up in small measures and then great sweeps. When he bought the bar that she sang in, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him hard, right on the step outside in front of the whole world.

He spun her around, controlled but victorious and quick enough to make her head spin, more romantic even than her wedding day. 

(He'd professed his vows in the chapel, as all good gentlemen must and as all good girls hope for, though his words rang out solemn as a funeral dirge. It was hard to be festive, with no family to either of their names. Still, she made do. He professed his vows again in her bedroom, prayers murmured to her soft inner thighs, and that was when she believed him. She believed him when he knelt before her, with no one else to lie for.)

She kissed him when he bought up the other bars, too, but with each conquest the pressure of his lips felt more distant. She watched him at nights, bent over his books attending to their finances, and felt him drifting so far away. Once upon a time, she'd hoped that money would make her happy. But amidst his growing riches he appeared pinched and pained, and she found herself resenting wealth all the more. 

She never questioned their good fortune. 

He moved her into a nice house, in the wealthier part of the city. He took her away from all of the risk and danger, padded her walls with unfamiliar comfort and told her there was no longer a need for her to sing in bars. Rattling around their elegant home filled with all of his fine things, she'd never felt so alone in her life. 

When she was singing, she never touched a drop. Ensconced within his sterile palace, she took solace in the flavors of gin and vermouth, let the liquor burn on her tongue the way his lips no longer did. 

-

She was drinking in the sitting room, that night he came in at half-past three.

Each evening he came home later and later, failed all the more to appreciate her presence warming his bed. She fancied she could hardly do him worse, ignoring him in kind when he came home. They were missed transmissions, words broadcasted just barely out of sync. Sometimes he spoke to her still, but she imagined with each passing day it became all the harder for her to hear. 

She could ignore him no longer, when he threw his satchel onto the settee and professed that they leave, immediately, that they needed to already be gone. 

“Gone?” she asked. “I'm already gone. I've left and gone away from this place an age or more before. And you, I wonder if you were ever here at all.”

He looked at her, shoulders swept back underneath the shadow of his suit jacket, spine held pool-cue-straight. She looked at him, eyebrows raised and eyes popped wide, and lifted her drink once more to her lips. 

“Goddamnit,” he told her. “You aren't gone, Rox, you're drunk, and we both need to leave.”

“Maybe I don't want to leave,” she ventured. “Maybe I finally want to stay.”

“We need to go, Rox,” he said, stumbling another few steps closer. 

She tilted her face up, raised her chin to keep him in sight.

He knelt before her seat, placed one of his palms atop her knee. “This isn't a choice, Roxy. We need to go, you need to come away with me. I'd impress upon you the absolute severity with which it becomes imperative we leave this house in this exact moment, but you're drunk, and it's too many words to say.”

“Try,” she asked of him, petal-soft, because when he knelt before her with naked words on his lips, there was hardly a thought she wouldn't take for truth. 

“I've been bad to you,” he admitted. “And I've made decisions that I cannot in a thousand years take back.”

With his empire of lounges and bars, his fortune that flowed only so long as the drink poured down, she wondered less that there were poor decisions, and more at which one was the first. 

“I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability,” he continued. “But, upon my lost soul, I won't be bad towards you again."

“You'll make promises you can't keep,” she whispered, into the shallow space between them. 

“I'll try,” he assured her. “And I'll be damned if I die here, so come away, if only to give me that opportunity to fail.”

“I'll pack.” 

She was poor again when she left with him, forced to leave all trappings of their past life behind. Waiting to catch their train, she didn't ask whose ire it was he had called down. She had his arm around her shoulders, his palm against her cheek. When his lips kissed her forehead, the immediacy seared like a burn, and though he might take her a thousand miles away from there, in that moment he was no more distant than the space of their silently co-mingling breath. 

-

-


End file.
